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takyon writes:

The Virgo gravitational wave detector, which is needed to triangulate the position of gravitational wave sources, is suffering from "microcracks" in sensitive glass and steel fibers:

On 20 February, dignitaries will descend on Virgo, Europe's premier gravitational wave detector near Pisa, Italy, for a dedication ceremony to celebrate a 5-year, €24 million upgrade. But the pomp will belie nagging problems that are likely to keep Virgo from joining its U.S. counterpart, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), in a hunt for gravitational wave sources that was meant to start next month. What has hobbled the 3-kilometer-long observatory: glass threads just 0.4 millimeters thick, which have proved unexpectedly fragile. The delay, which could last a year, is "very frustrating for everyone," says LIGO team member Bruce Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany.

A year ago, LIGO confirmed a prediction made by Albert Einstein a century earlier: that violent cosmic events, like the merger of two black holes, would wrench the fabric of spacetime and emit ripples. But LIGO, with two instruments in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, cannot pinpoint the sources of the waves, which would let astronomers train other telescopes on them. Triangulating on the sources requires a third detector: Virgo.

[...] The tiniest vibrations—earth tremors, the rumble of trains, even surf crashing on distant beaches—can swamp the signal of gravitational waves. So engineers must painstakingly isolate the detectors from noise. At Virgo, for example, the mirrors are suspended at the end of a chain of seven pendulums. For the upgrade, steel wires connecting the mirror to the weight above it were replaced with pure glass fibers to reduce thermal and mechanical noise. But a year ago, the glass threads began shattering, sometimes days or weeks after the 40-kilogram mirrors were suspended from them. After months of investigation, the team found the culprit: microscopic particles of debris from the pumps of the upgraded vacuum system. When these particles settled on the glass fibers they created microcracks, which widened over days and weeks until the fibers failed. "The fibers are very robust until something touches their surface," says Giovanni Losurdo, Advanced Virgo project leader at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Pisa.

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